Anodyneâ€™s Usage Of The Pirate Bay For Promotion Pays Off Big

Remember Anodyne, the game that willingly offered itself to the filthy, no good denizens of The Pirate Bay, who can't be bothered to pay a red cent for entertainment like the rest of us hard working [insert the name of your country here], and who instead downloads everything for free, like the world owes them?

Or so the stereotype goes. Well, as it turns out, it was the best business move the games creators could have ever made. As Kotaku notes, the partnership with world's foremost name in torrents moved more copies of the game than all of the reviews that came before it ever did.

Apparently, it cost Jon Kittaka and Sean Hogan, the developers of Anodyne, just seven dollars to have a picture of their game on the front page of The Pirate Bay (which dubbed itself The Promo Bay). The image in turn linked to a page where one could download a torrented copy, as well as offer a donation, plus cast a Steam Greenlight vote.

In the 72 hour period in which the game was on The Pirate/Promo Bay, page views of the Greenlight page had doubled, nearly 5,000 copies of the game was sold, over 240,000 unique visitors went to the game's website, and perhaps most important of all, the game raked in $12,000.

Again, by aligning with a place that is the haven for individuals who supposedly don't appreciate all the hard work that goes into creating content, and could care less about their creators' need to pay the bills.

As for how the game did before the promotion, there were only 40,000 unique visitors and 900 copies sold, at around $8 dollars a pop, over the span of ten days. Kittaka and Hogan are, not surprisingly, very happy with the results:

"Does the promo work? Yes! I think everything is much better off now – revenue, people playing, fans, etc, than we were before the promo… I definitely encourage trying something similar with The Promo Bay if you're able to."

At this moment, The Pirate/Promo Bay is featuring some kind of rap album that features zombies. Hopefully this new genre of music will see similar success.